Towards illumination invariance in the legged league

Abstract

To date, RoboCup games have all been played under constant, bright lighting conditions. However, in order to meet the over-all goal of RoboCup, robots will need to be able to seamlessly handle changing, natural light. One method for doing so is to be able to identify colors regardless of illumination: color constancy. Color constancy is a relatively recent, but increasingly important, topic in vision research. Most approaches so far have focussed on stationary cameras. In this paper we propose a methodology for color constancy on mobile robots. We describe a technique that we have used to solve a subset of the problem, in real-time, based on color space distributions and the KL-divergence measure. We fully implement our technique and present detailed empirical results in a robot soccer scenario. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.